THE LAST SEPTEMBER 11

by Ariel Dorfman

I have been through this before.

During the last 28 years, Tuesday, Sept. 11, has been a date of mourning,
for me and millions of others, ever since that day in 1973 when Chile
lost its democracy in a military coup, that day when death irrevocably
entered our lives and changed us forever. And now, almost three decades
later, the malignant gods of random history have wanted to impose upon
another country that dreadful date, again a Tuesday, once again an 11th
of September filled with death.

The differences and distances that separate the Chilean date from the
American are, one must admit, considerable. The depraved terrorist attack
against the most powerful nation on Earth has and will have consequences
which affect all humanity. It is possible that it may constitute, as President
Bush has stated, the start of the Third World War and it is probable that
it will be branded in the manuals of the future as the day when the planets
history shifted forever. Whereas very few of the eight billion people
alive today could remember or would be able to identity what happened
in Chile.

And yet, from the moment when, transfigured, I watched on our t.v. screen
here in North Carolina that second plane exploding into the World Trade
Centers South Tower, I have been haunted by the need to understand
and extract the hidden meaning of the juxtaposition and coincidence of
these two September 11ths  which in my case becomes even more enigmatic
and personal because it is a violation that conjoins the two foundational
cities of my existence, the New York which gave me refuge and joy during
ten years of my infancy and the Santiago which protected my adolescence
under its mountains and made me into a man, the two cities that offered
me my two languages, English and Spanish. It has been, therefore, tentatively,
breathing slowly to overcome the emotional shock; making every effort
not to look again and again at the contaminating photo of the man who
falls vertically, so straight, so straight, from the heights of that building;
trying to stop thinking about the last seconds of those plane passengers
who know that their imminent doom will also kill thousands of their own
innocent compatriots; in the midst of frantic phone calls that should
tell me if my friends in Manhattan are well and that nobody answers; it
is in the middle of all this turmoil that I yield myself to the gradual
realization that there is something horribly familiar, even recognizable,
in this experience that (north) Americans are now passing through.

The resemblance I am evoking goes well beyond a facile and superficial
comparison  for instance, that both in Chile in 1973 and in the
States today, terror descended from the sky to destroy the symbols of
national identity, the Palace of the Presidents in Santiago, the icons
of financial and military power in New York and Washington. No, what I
recognize is something deeper, a parallel suffering, a similar pain, a
commensurate disorientation echoing what we lived through in Chile as
of that September 11th. Its most extraordinary incarnation 
I still cannot believe what I am witnessing  is that on the screen
I see hundreds of relatives wandering the streets of New York, clutching
the photos of their sons, fathers, wives, lovers, daughters, begging for
information, asking if they are alive or dead, the whole United States
forced to look into the abyss of what it means to be desaparecido, with
no certainty or funeral possible for those beloved men and women who are
missing. And I also recognize and repeat that sensation of extreme unreality
that invariably accompanies great disasters caused by human iniquity,
so much more difficult to cope with than natural catastrophes. Over and
over again I hear phrases that remind me of what people like me would
mutter to themselves during the 1973 military coup and the days that followed:
This cannot be happening to us. This sort of excessive violence
happens to other people and not to us, we have only known this form of
destruction through movies and books and remote photographs. If its
a nightmare, why cant we cant awaken from it? And words
reiterated unceasingly, twenty eight years ago and now again in the year
2001: We have lost our innocence. The world will never be the same.

What has come to an explosive conclusion, of course, is (North) Americas
famous exceptionalism, that attitude which allowed the citizens of this
country to imagine themselves as beyond the sorrows and calamities that
have plagued less fortunate peoples around the world. None of the great
battles of the twentieth century had touched the continental United States.
Even the Pearl Harbor Day of Infamy which is being tiredly
extricated from the past as the only possible analogous incident, occurred
thousands of miles away. It is that complacent invulnerability which has
been fractured forever. Life in these United States will have to share,
from now on, the precariousness and uncertainty that is the daily lot
of the enormous majority of this planets other inhabitants.

In spite of the tremendous pain, the intolerable losses that this apocalyptic
crime has visited upon the American public, I wonder if this trial does
not constitute one of those opportunities for regeneration and self-knowledge
that, from time to time, is give to certain nations. A crisis of this
magnitude can lead to renewal or destruction, it can be used for good
or for evil, for peace or for war, for aggression or for reconciliation,
for vengeance or for justice, for the militarization of a society or its
humanization. One of the ways for Americans to overcome their trauma and
survive the fear and continue to live and thrive in the midst of the insecurity
which has suddenly swallowed them is to admit that their suffering is
neither unique nor exclusive, that they are connected, as long as they
are willing to look at themselves in the vast mirror of our common humanity,
with so many other human beings who, in apparently faraway zones, have
suffered similar situations of unanticipated and often protracted injury
and fury.

Could this be the hidden and hardly conceivable reason that destiny
has decided that the first contemporary attack on the essence and core
of the United States, would transpire precisely on the very anniversary
that commemorates the military takeover in Chile that a government in
Washington nourished and sustained in the name of the American people?
Could it be a way to mark the immense challenge that awaits the citizens
of this country, particularly its young, now that they know what it really
means to be victimized, now that they can grasp the sort of collective
hell survivors withstand when their loved ones have disappeared without
a body to bury, now that they have been given the chance to draw closer
to and comprehend the multiple variations of the many September 11ths
that are scattered throughout the globe, the kindred sufferings that so
many peoples and countries endure?

The terrorists have wanted to single out and isolate the United States
as a satanic state. The rest of the planet, including many nations and
men and women who have been the object of American arrogance and intervention
reject  as I categorically do  this demonization. It is enough
to see the almost unanimous outpouring of grief of most of the world,
the offers of help, the expressions of solidarity, the determination to
claim the dead of this mass murder as our dead.

It remains to be seen if this compassion shown to the mightiest power
on this planet will be reciprocated. It is still not clear if the United
States  a country formed in great measure by those who have themselves
escaped vast catastrophes, famines, dictatorships, persecution 
it is far from certain that the men and women of this nation so full of
hope and tolerance, will be able to feel that same empathy towards the
other outcast members of our species, we will find out in the days and
years to come if the new Americans forged in pain and resurrection are
ready and open and willing to participate in the arduous process of repairing
our shared, our damaged humanity. Creating, all of us together, a world
in which we need never again lament not one more, not even one more terrifying
September 11th.